“Corey’s style of teaching is inviting and friendly, and his knowledge of Search Engine Marketing is top notch.I learned beyond expectations in a short period of time, and acquired a seemingly endless list of products, services, and blogs that armed me with the tools and knowledge to immediately push my newly absorbed knowledge into high gear.

The classes also proved fruitful in my job search.I had recently been laid off when I enrolled in the classes and, as money was tight, I was nervous about spending the money.But it paid off when one employer called me almost immediately after sending my resume telling me: “Your Google AdWords training caught my attention.”

Digital Asset Optimization is a somewhat new term to describe what many SEO specialists have been driving toward for a while now.

Here’s a quick video of my explanation of what it is. Read on below for more details.

To start with, let’s remind ourselves of what SEO is. I originally wrote that there are a lot of definitions out there, but let’s go with my definition of SEO. (After all, this is my blog.) It is written below.

As a verb: “The art and science of increasing the volume of significant and profitable traffic from unpaid results on search engines.”

As a noun: “Those that perform the art and science of SEO (as listed above).”

In the definition above, note that we are talking about search engines and traffic. Generally speaking, it was done on web pages.

But just in the last six months, we are now realizing that search engines don’t just rank websites. With blended search, universal search, or whatever you want to call it, we now are finding more and more other things showing up on search engine results. These could include images, videos, local results, and just about anything else, including Tweets, LinkedIn profiles, etc.

So the need now is not just to optimize web pages, but optimize all our “Digital Assets”. To take it a step further, we need to optimize them not only for search engines, but for social media and many other things.

During March 6–8, 2009, I had the pleasure of attending StomperNet Live 7 which is owned by Andy Jenkins. I attended as a guest of one of the speakers, to which I am very grateful.

So what exactly is a StomperNet Live event?

Do a little research and you will find that many of the successful online marketers are faculty members of StomperNet. This creates an interesting dynamic. Each of them has their own specialties and most all of them have both made and lost a lot of money.

Interestingly, because so many of them are good marketers, they tend to think and act like online marketers even when they are not doing online marketing. This gives an attendee an excellent opportunity to see what it takes to do this and succeed.

But occasionally, it also means they may do some strange things that we don’t normally see in the physical world of conferences.

For example, they are going to always start every session with a story of how they had nothing and rose to riches. Every time.

Also, most of the speakers seemed to be at least somewhat “winging it” through their presentations. This is especially apparent if you have gone to other conferences.

My personal opinion is that this is what online marketers do every day. “Ready, Fire, Aim” is what we do. “Throw it up there and test to see if it works.” Unfortunately, this is not really the best way to do a presentation. I (and others I talked to) would prefer the presenters to be more prepared (and on time).

But those are minor things in comparison to the benefits of attending. Usually only “StomperNet Members” can attend StomperNet Live, but that rule seems to be getting relaxed a little. I saw a lot of “guests” there besides me.

So what are the benefits?

You can get your site reviewed by the faculty.

You can attend confidential roundtable discussions where you can get anything answered.

You can even just stop anyone in the hallways and chat. I got one of my most important questions answered by David Bullock. (Thanks David – he’s awesome.)

You get to mingle with lots of other e-commerce retailers.

The attendees are probably about half e-commerce retailers that are relatively successful. The other half seemed to be learning or just curious. It’s a great event for either group.

Attending one of these StomperNet Live events was a great opportunity for me and I learned a lot. Some sessions were definitely better than others, but that’s typical of most events.

StomperNet live does seem to be a little expensive, but if you want to learn from some of the best experts out there, this is probably your best opportunity. If you apply just 1% of what you learn, I’m sure you could make it back easily.

Thanks again to Andy Jenkins and the others for pulling this off.

Any other attendees reading this? Faculty members? Feel free to comment below if I missed anything or was inaccurate in my comments.

Here is a couple of the vendors I enjoyed learning about at StomperNet. There were a few others, but these were the few I thought were worth mentioning.

1. Infusionsoft is marketing automation software. In other words, they have an all-in-one solution for not just e-commerce, but for keeping track of your customers (CRM) and following up automatically on all leads.

It seems to be one of the coolest things I saw. I wish I could magically move my e-commerce sites and design to something like this. If I could start over, I’d be tempted to do this and automate it.

PS to InfusionSoft: Your product is awesome. But the hour-long commercial presentation on Saturday night was kinda irritating. I really like what you have and would really have preferred seeing some screenshots.

2. ProtectedPdf offers flexible digital rights management for PDF files. This was interesting. I doubt I will ever need it, but it is something a client could ask for. They don’t just protect it, but also show how many times it is opened and by who. Cool.

3. VergePoint is a Web 2.0 Design company. They have a nice arrangement for getting a website that includes all the bells and whistles. they can also do most any Internet marketing you may want as well. Their real advantage seems to be that they can do it all very fast.

They seem to be a good solution to someone that wants to go from nothing to something good and be up and running quickly.

The third and final day at StomperNet Live started with a great presentation from David Bullock. David is a very interesting individual that took on a very large project of documenting the success story of Barack Obama’s campaign.

NOTE: Unfortunately, StomperNet has requested that I take these notes down from off the blogosphere. I’m disappointed, because I thought it was good information that would help build appreciation for the value of StomperNet Live. Yet, they seem to feel that the information is only for members.

From the start of StomperNet Live, we were told that we could not blog about certain confidential roundtable sessions. This was not one of them so I assumed I could write about it.

My appologies. It is down now.

If StomperNet has any more problems like this, I’ll be happy to oblige. Just let me know

This is day two at StomperNet Live. The morning will start up with a presentation by Perry Belcher. The title is…

Social Media: How to Build a Massive List of Rabid Fans & Become a Celebrity in ANY Niche in 90 Days or Less.

Perry is #24 in Twitter rank. He got there in four months. He says that he only spent a total of about 2 hours per day to get there. Here are some of his comments…

NOTE: Unfortunately, StomperNet has requested that I take these notes down from off the blogosphere. I’m disappointed, because I thought it was good information that would help build appreciation for the value of StomperNet Live. Yet, they seem to feel that the information is only for members.

From the start of StomperNet Live, we were told that we could not blog about certain confidential roundtable sessions. This was not one of them so I assumed I could write about it.

My appologies. It is down now.

I am just keeping the two small notes below. One is my personal thought. The 2nd has to do with a comment that has been mentioned in other blogs that would not make sense if to others if I removed it. If StomperNet has any more problems like this, I’ll be happy to oblige.

Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are the big three players in Social Media. Interestingly he did not talk about LinkedIn or StumbleUpon and that is probably because there is little you can do in them to influence them.

Perry tried reaching M. C. Hammer a couple times and he did not respond. So he told his followers and over 900 people told M.C. Hammer to call Perry. Five minutes later the manger for M.C. Hammer called and told him that M.C. is sleeping and will call him when he wakes up.

This is somewhat of a continuation of the previous post. Paul explained how to create an informational product that you can sell.

NOTE: Unfortunately, StomperNet has requested that I take these notes down from off the blogosphere. I’m disappointed, because I thought it was good information that would help build appreciation for the value of StomperNet Live. Yet, they seem to feel that the information is only for members.

From the start of StomperNet Live, we were told that we could not blog about certain confidential roundtable sessions. This was not one of them so I assumed I could write about it.

My appologies. It is down now.

If StomperNet has any more problems like this, I’ll be happy to oblige. Just let me know

Today is my first day of attending StomperNet Live. This day (Friday) is actually not typical StomperNet stuff. That happens tomorrow and Sunday.

Today is mostly Paul Lemberg. He is more like a business consultant than an online marketing guru. He is the creator of “Formula Five” and has some very good ideas on how to increase profit margins and do other things that will improve theh bottom line.

For most of the morning, he talked about how to produce a product to sell. More specifically, it was about how to produce “more” products so that your current customers would spend more money with you.

This is good stuff to think about. Paul basically presented a process for what to do. It applies to those that want to make money online and/or for those that already do and want to make more.

Here are some of my notes…

NOTE: Unfortunately, StomperNet has requested that I take these notes down from off the blogosphere. I’m disappointed, because I thought it was good information that would help build appreciation for the value of StomperNet Live. Yet, they seem to feel that the information is only for members.

From the start of StomperNet Live, we were told that we could not blog about certain confidential roundtable sessions. This was not one of them so I assumed I could write about it.

My appologies. It is down now.

If StomperNet has any more problems like this, I’ll be happy to oblige. Just let me know

In about a half hour, the first opening session at StomperNet Live 7 will start. But I have already learned some things – about hotels.

You see, I’m here as a guest. In other words, I do not pay the $10,000 per year to be a member. Someone invited me and I’m therefore here for free. Cool, eh? At any rate, I figured I would enjoy it a little extra by staying right at the same hotel it is held at.

Bad idea. When you stay at a big, nice hotel like the Hyatt in downtown Atlanta, the price of the hotel is just the beginning. They charge you quite a bit for Internet access, parking, and just about everything you can think of.

I’m not complaining about this hotel. It’s actually quite beautiful. I know all big fancy hotels do the same thing. It just cracks me up that smaller cheaper hotels give wifi and other things away for free. But when you pay twice as much, they expect you to keep paying.

Oh well. No worries. I’m sure I’ll learn a lot at this event. I’m sure I’ll make any money I spend back again in the next 3–6 months easy.